The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

In The Savage God Al Alvarez confronts the controversial and often taboo area of human behaviour: suicide. He embraces both the cultural attitudes and the development of theoretical studies, giving a broad basis for his examination of suicide through the standpoint of literature, and follows the black thread leading from Dante, through Donne and the Romantic Agony, to Dada and the Savage God at the heart of modern literature. As a framework for his study, Alvarez gives his personal accounts of two suicide attempts: that of Sylvia Plath, the gifted young American poet who took her life in 1963, and his own unsuccessful attempt, to form the most important title on this subject yet published.